Chuck vs the Man From Eureka
by Knight-Ander
Summary: The Intersect has never shown Chuck anything good, but then he flashes on Jack Carter.  Takes place during the first season of Chuck and in a slight AU of the early seasons of Eureka.  Also with Sarah, Casey, Buy More gang, Allison, Zoe, & Kevin.


**Chuck versus the Man from Eureka**

"We've got a couple of hours before we have to be at the airport, who's hungry?" Jack Carter asked as he pulled his rented SUV into a strip mall parking lot.

"I'm hungry!" Kevin Blake declared from the back seat, his eyes never lifting from the thick book of Soduku puzzles he was working on.

Jack smiled. "That's the spirit, Kev. Oh, how about hot dogs?" He said, spotting a Weinerlicious at one end of the mall.

"Hot dogs!"

"I'm a vegetarian, Dad," Zoe, Jack's teenaged daughter, pointed out from the seat next to Kevin. "Hot dogs are not kosher."

Jack shrugged. "Well there's a salad type place a few doors down, you can get something there."

Allison Blake, Kevin's mother and Jack's fiancé shook her head. She was in Los Angeles for a Department of Defense Emerging Technologies conference as the liaison from Global Dynamics. "I can only imagine what Vincent would think."

Jack laughed as he put the vehicle in park in front of the Weinerlicious. He decided to join Allison in Los Angeles as an effort to help bond the two families, while allowing Zoe to visit her mom for a few days while they were in town. Plus he really needed a vacation. "He's probably shivering with revulsion just imagining what we'd be eating down here."

Jack's cell-phone went off at the very moment he opened his door, startling him, causing him to frantically search his pockets. "Why did I put that thing on Vibrate?" he grimaced. Unfortunately, when he finally found the device, it vibrated right out of his hand, smashing open on the blacktop at his feet. "Oh, great."

Witnessing her fiancé's clumsiness, Allison pulled her PDA from her purse and hit speed-dial. "Hello, Deputy Lupo? This is Allison Blake. Were you just trying to get a hold of Sheriff Carter? Yeah, he dropped it."

"You didn't need to tell her that," Jack grumbled as he picked up the pieces of his phone. "At least it looks salvageable." He looked around the mall for an electronics store. Maybe someone there could put together his phone.

"Thanks, Jo, I'll tell him that," Allison said, ending the call and returning her PDA to the safety of her purse. "Deputy Lupo was calling to check in, just as you ordered."

"Good," Jack said, almost more embarrassed by the fact that he had Jo calling in with updates on how things were in Eureka than for dropping his phone. Some people just can't totally pull themselves away from their job while on vacation. "There's a Buy More over there. I'll go see if they can do anything for my phone. You got lunch covered?"

Allison nodded. "I think I can handle it."

"Hey, klutz, uh, I mean, Dad."

Jack spun on his daughter and gave her a stern look. Zoe held her hand out and snapped her fingers. "What's that?"

"I'm going to need cash if I'm getting something to eat at Salad Sity," Zoe said, her hand still out expectantly.

Jack riffled through his wallet, disappointed to discover that he only had two fifties. He handed Zoe one of the bills. "I want all of the change back and get a receipt."

Inside the Buy More, underneath the Nerd Herd sign, Chuck Bartowski patiently listened to his friend Morgan's online exploits while organizing a thick bundle of work orders.

"So I get around the corner of this smashed in house, and from out of nowhere this dude lobs a grenade at me-."

"That's what the heads-up-display is for, Morgan," Chuck said without look up.

"Yeah, whatever, but he misses me, and I've got, like, two seconds to get away before it bounces back right in my face. So I bust my shoulder getting through a door to get away from the grenade and run right smack into-."

"The guy who threw the grenade."

"Right! And he's looking in the wrong direction, so I'm down to my last clip and I just empty it into the guy."

"That's always fun," John Casey, another Buy More green-shirt associate inserted into the conversation.

Chuck's head popped up. Casey wasn't just an ordinary Buy More employee like Morgan, but an undercover NSA agent assigned to protect Chuck whose mind was filled with top government secrets courtesy of an email from an old friend filled with encrypted images. Casey was also an assassin, and probably the most intimidating person Chuck had ever met. "Casey, can I help you?"

"Yeah." He turned to Morgan. "Shorty. The skirt over there is looking for a good game for her little brother. I figured you were the person she should talk to."

Morgan eyed the long-haired brunette walking the video game aisle, absently chewing on one of her manicured fingernails, obviously clueless. He patted Casey on his muscular shoulder. "I'm on it, Big Guy."

"Good luck," Chuck said by way of encouragement before returning his attention to Casey. "So why are you really here? Want me to look through some photos, recently obtained documents, see if I flash on anything?" Chuck wasn't thrilled with having all these secrets in his head, but this whole spy game was pretty exciting, so there was a hint of eagerness in his voice.

"No. I just thought that Morgan could actually help someone with something," Casey said bluntly before moving on toward the appliance section.

Chuck sighed. Well, so much for-.

"Hi there. Say, could you help me put my phone together? I dropped it in the parking lot and it turned into a bit of a mess."

Chuck lifted his head. "Sure I could-."

Albert Einstein. The Leaning Tower of Pisa. A bouquet of daisies. A US Marshall's badge. A vault filled with gold. Neil Armstrong on the moon. An atomic bomb exploding.

Then Chuck blinked.

"Hello?" The customer had an odd look on his face. "Are you alright?"

"What? Oh, that's just what happens when I have to…" he looked at the disassembled phone in front of him. "Think about what device… yeah, this is a Motorolla… and I see you have all of the screws… yeah, this should be no problem."

"Fantastic!"

Chuck pulled a mini-screwdriver from his shirt pocket and started to work on the phone all the while trying to process what the images that just flashed in his head meant. Sometimes they were forbearers of doom, but this time he actually saw something that got him excited in a good way.

It took him just over a minute to repair Sheriff Carter's phone. "There you go, sir. Good as new."

Carter picked up his phone and turned it on to make sure it was functioning properly, but his eyes kept drifting to the video wall behind Chuck. "Is that today's Dodgers-Mets game?"

Chuck turned in his chair. "Yep. All on over a dozen High-Definition plasma screens. Even better than being at the game."

"Wow." Carter was hypnotized. "Thanks for fixing the phone," he mumbled before drifting to the video screens like a moth to a flame.

"Anytime." Chuck checked his watch. He had to share what he knew with someone, and it was close enough to his lunch break that he knew exactly who he could share it with.

"Lester, Jeff. You guys want to take over here while I go on break?"

At a table outside the Weinerlicious, Zoe Carter snatched a french fry from the pile in front of Kevin, who had eaten his hot dog and half his fries before returning his attention to the Soduku book. Zoe's salad was good, but the fries were just too tempting to pass up.

"How long ago did you give him this book?"

"About an hour ago," Allison told their waitress. "He should have it done by the time we get to the airport."

"Sarah. Sarah!"

The waitress slowly peeled her eyes from Kevin's amazing display of puzzle-solving, as a man in a Nerd Herd shirt approached. "Chuck? Lunch break?"

"Yeah, and boy do I have something to tell you."

Sarah turned to Zoe, Allison and Kevin. "Anything else I can get you?"

"If you can get my dad out of the Buy More that would be great," Zoe said, taking another of Kevin's fries and reminding herself that fries were potatoes and potatoes were vegetables.

The eyes of the man in the Nerd Herd shirt went wide. "The guy with the broken phone? He's inside watching the Dodgers' game."

Allison wasn't surprised. "I'll get him." She turned to Kevin. "You'll be okay without me?"

Kevin just nodded, turning another page in the puzzle book.

Sarah Walker wasn't just a waitress at the Weinerlicious. She was also an undercover CIA agent working with Casey to protect Chuck. Sarah's cover was being Chuck's girlfriend, which could make things complicated at times. Only she and Casey knew about the secrets in Chuck's head. "The usual, Chuck?" she asked as she went behind the counter.

"No, this is something totally unusual!"

Sarah could hear the excitement in Chuck's voice. "Did you flash on something?"

Chuck's head bobbed up and down like it was on a spring. "Yeah, yeah. You know how all these images in my head are usually about terrorist or horrible people and bad stuff happening, right?"

"That's pretty much everything we've encountered so far."

Chuck put on a lop-sided grin. "Well I just flashed on something that's not scary, well kinda, in ways, but actually really cool."

The fryer alarm went off behind Sarah. "Seriously? How so?" She pulled the fries from the oil and dumped them into the heating tray.

"There's this guy who came in to the Buy More to get his phone fixed, and he's actually the sheriff of a top secret town called Eureka which was devised by Albert Einstein and President Truman where all of America's top scientist, thinkers, and geniuses work on developing the next era of scientific achievement in a totally supportive environment." Chuck was getting excited just thinking about it. "We're talking billions of dollars in financial support for research into healthcare, genetics, defense…. Oh, my god!"

Chuck's change in tone frightened Sarah. "Chuck, what is it?"

"We've been to Mars!" His voice was a whisper, but then it got louder. "We have people walking on Mars!"

"Quiet, Chuck," Sarah hissed, looking back toward the door. "The customers outside might hear you."

Chuck's smile widened. "But that's the thing. That lady out there is Allison Blake, Department of Defense liaison to Global Dynamics, the head research organization in Eureka, and the same people that put men on Mars! She already knows!"

Sarah tried to calm Chuck. "She knows, but maybe we shouldn't."

Chuck was lost in the knowledge that flashed when he first saw Sarah's customers. "The girl is Sheriff Carter's daughter, Zoe, who's a bit of a delinquent. The boy is Dr. Blake's son, who has autism, but…." Chuck stopped, surprised. "But there are portions of his file that are missing."

Now it was Sarah's turn to be surprise. "Missing?"

"Yeah, like someone had erased them from the Intersect before Bryce got to it."

Then an explosion from the parking lot blew in the windows, knocking Chuck and Sarah to the ground. Sarah was quick to her feet and rushed out to find the children knocked off their chairs. "Are you two hurt?"

Zoe shook her head. "I think I'm fine. Kevin?"

The youngster nodded. "Yeah, what was that? Where's Mom?"

Zoe looked toward the parking lot where she spotted her dad and Allison rushing out of the Buy More. "She's on her way, Kev."

Several people had gathered in the parking lot, including Chuck, Morgan, Casey, and Sheriff Carter. "What happened? Car-bomb?" Chuck asked Casey.

Casey examined the scene with a practiced eye. "No, there would be more carnage. It looks more like a meteor hit."

"Or an alien toilet," Morgan said, holding up what looked liked a charred piece of a toilet seat.

Carter sighed as he looked from the toilet seat to his rented SUV. "Yeah, that can't be good."

_End_


End file.
